Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (38 page)

The centrality of America as a target is never forgotten. In one correspondence bin Laden emphasizes that “operations inside America are some of the most important work of the Organization, as long as they are possible, because they affect the security and economy of the American people as a whole.”

Bin Laden recommends that a German brother give “an idea about how work is done inside America.” Then he identifies an American (Azzam al-Amriki) “who can follow up on research posted on the Internet by Western centers, especially the American ones. He could also translate whatever is useful to the brothers in this field, and write his opinions about work inside America.” Bin Laden even suggests he conduct English-language classes for some.

The letters reveal the incredible stress being felt within the organization as a result of the strikes. They read like a running eulogy of senior AQ figures with whom bin Laden was familiar. “I convey my condolences regarding our great brother Sheikh Said . . . [who] died as a martyr during a spy plane attack. . . . We think we must announce his death because he is a senior person who had addressed the Ummah [the community of believers] and the Ummah knows him.”

“The strikes by the spy planes are still going on. . . . Our brother Al-sa’di [Ihsanullah] . . . was the latest to become a martyr. He was killed about a week ago, also by air raids. . . . The mid-level commands and staff members are hurt by the killings. Compensating for the loss is going slowly.”

“I am informing you about the death of brother Hamzah Al-Jawfi. . . . It came at the hands of spy planes in southern Waziristan; others were killed with him but we are not sure who yet.”

“The issue got more complicated after the killing of Muhammad Khan and Brother Mu’awiyah Al-Balushi. . . . They went to find out about places . . . and upon their return they were also martyred in an air strike.”

The signature strikes were also taking a toll, physically and psychologically. A bin Laden lieutenant complained after “the killing of twenty brothers in one place on the day of Eid” that they had “gathered for the holidays, despite our orders and our emphasizing to avoid gathering in one place . . . but sometimes they discuss matters and take their own decisions.”

Al-Qaeda acquired a healthy respect for American intelligence. “As we see it, based on our analysis, they are constantly monitoring several potential or confirmed targets. But they only hit them if they discover a valuable human target inside, or a gathering, or during difficult times (like revenge attacks for example).” The last wasn’t true, but it didn’t hurt that they thought so.

The seeming ubiquity of reconnaissance and the suddenness of strikes were wearing them down. “As you know,” went a report to bin Laden,
“everybody is threatened—as long as he moves—by a missile.” And, “The strikes by the spy planes are still going on. . . . The planes are still circling our skies nearly every day.”

Folks in the field entreated bin Laden: “We would like your guidance. Especially on this idea: reduce the work; meaning stopping many of the operations so we can move around less, and be less exposed to strikes.”

A suggestion was raised. “There is an idea preferred by some brothers to avoid attrition (the loss of staff, leaders, and the organization’s old elites). The idea is that some brothers will travel to some ‘safe’ areas with their families, just for protection. They would only stay for a time, until the crisis is over, maybe one or two years.” The author offers some ideas for safe havens: Sind, Baluchistan, Iran.

Two months later bin Laden agrees they should be taking refuge in safer areas and “calming down and minimizing movement.”

All of this correspondence released from the Abbottabad haul was from 2010, but it is consistent with the intelligence picture we were building as 2008 wore on. The strikes were having the impact we desired and the impact we expected. The al-Qaeda main body along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was spending a lot more time worrying about its own survival than it was planning how to threaten ours.

Still, there was nervousness in our government that this campaign would shred an already tattered relationship with Islamabad. Others suggested that this could create chaos on the ground. I once coldly responded, “Maybe, but chaos is not a safe haven. Remember, this is about threats to the homeland.”

But chaos wasn’t our objective. Al-Qaeda was. Collateral damage was a continuing concern, and the United States worked hard to avoid it.

In that strike against the WMD operative noted earlier, his grandson was sleeping on a cot near him in the compound. The Hellfire missiles were carefully directed so that their energy and fragments splayed away from him and toward his grandfather. They did. But not enough.

His grandfather was a very dangerous terrorist. He had a garage full of chemicals and an intent to use them. He was hard to locate and people
were risking their lives to find him. The United States took the shot. We sincerely regretted the child’s death.

We always tried to get better. Carefully reviewing the video after one very successful strike, one could in retrospect discern—as a GBU was in the air hurtling toward an arms cache—an obviously frightened woman, responding to an earlier weapon that had just detonated, bolting with some young children into the path of the incoming bomb from a place of relative safety. That resulted in our putting more eyes on targets
as they were being struck
to avoid such things.

Despite such incidents, I think it a fair assessment that the targeted killing program has been the most precise application of firepower in the history of armed conflict.

The accuracy and effectiveness of this US government campaign was one of the things that I was asked about by President-elect Obama in December 2008. He was very attentive. Greg Craig, the president’s incoming counsel, later told me that my views had convinced the president-elect of the program’s utility. I’m not sure how much convincing he needed, but once in office President Obama doubled down on targeted killings, to great effect, as the Abbottabad documents attest.

Al-Qaeda prime, that original organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was made a shell of its former self and that was well before the bin Laden kill. All the whooping and hollering on Pennsylvania Avenue and in Lafayette Square the night of bin Laden’s demise probably represented a sense of closure for much of the public (and for intelligence professionals, too, based on the phone calls I got that night). But the United States had been killing al-Qaeda operations chiefs routinely and serially for three years by then.

The longer they have gone on, though, the more controversial drone strikes have become. Part of that has been the inevitable claims (exaggerated, but not wholly inaccurate) of collateral damage. Part of that has been the traumatizing effect of these killings on local populations (true enough, even in the face of intelligence and other reporting that suggests most Pashtuns rarely shed tears for the deaths of bullying Arabs and
Uzbeks). Part of that was also the product of a troubling American habit, confined largely to political elites, of complaining that intelligence agencies have not done enough when they feel in danger and then complaining that they have done too much when they are feeling safe again.

In truth, though, targeted killings have always had multiple effects, and some of those were bad—effects like straining relationships with allies (especially Europeans who legally did not support this) or seeming to confirm al-Qaeda recruiting narratives about the perfidy of the Crusaders. Then there was indirectly incentivizing al-Qaeda to put more emphasis on the franchises away from the FATA. Indeed, the very success of targeted killing in South Asia accelerated al-Qaeda’s efforts to metastasize into its now more dispersed, albeit less capable, affiliates.

But in 2008 (and apparently continuing into 2009 and 2010) these effects were all trumped by the first order effect of killing those who were already able and willing to do us harm. And as far as the strikes helping al-Qaeda to recruit, nothing would have prompted more flocking to the black banners than a spectacular AQ success.

I usually thought of this in terms of the deep fight and the close fight. The close fight in this war meant dealing with those already committed to killing us. For handling them, targeted killing was ideal. The deep fight, on the other hand, was about the production rate of those who would intend us harm in one, three, five, or ten years. That was a tougher fight, largely ideological, and how we conducted the close fight could affect the deep fight, especially if it accelerated recruitment or deepened sympathy.

Even as we waged the close battle, we always had the deep fight in mind. In those three weeks when I was Barack Obama’s CIA chief, I discussed a successful strike on al-Qaeda on the margins of a White House Situation Room meeting. After the session Rahm Emanuel, the blunt new chief of staff, surprisingly congratulated me on CIA’s role in the kill. I thanked him, but felt compelled to add, “Rahm, remember. That was a CT success. Unless we change conditions on the ground, we’re going to get to kill people forever.”

Concerns over the “foreverness” aspect of this eventually began to show up in presidential comments, culminating in a major presidential speech in May 2013. It seems that President Obama had been wanting to make this speech for some time. Even out of government, I was getting frequent cues of an imminent address on the CT way ahead. One had apparently been penciled in for a date right before the Boston Marathon bombing but had been cancelled, no doubt much to the later relief of the president’s communications team.

With Boston and the Tsarnaevs bundled up, the president finally went onstage at National Defense University to reflect and direct. It was a remarkable speech, long and deeply personal, more Hamlet than Patton (or even Marshall), but truly reflective of a personal ambivalence over the dilemmas we face.

It was about ending what one of the president’s top advisors called the “forever war.” The president himself said, “[T]his war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

A president who at that point had conducted 85 percent of all secret drone strikes in human history called for limits, transparency, oversight, and the near elimination of collateral damage from such strikes. A president who had been conducting global war for more than four years then called on Congress to refine and eventually eliminate his authority to conduct that war by withdrawing and then reissuing a much more confining Authorization for the Use of Military Force.

The analytic premise of the speech was, of course, flawed. Although it correctly assessed that core al-Qaeda was “a shell of its former self,” it badly downplayed emerging threats: “In the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al-Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.” That was a high-end version of his later description of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria as the JV [junior varsity] team. That was all terribly wrong, but that realization would only become (painfully) clear later.

What seemed obvious at the time, though, was that the president was uncomfortable with his own actions. A not unfair summary of the
one-hour talk might have been, “Even if you think I’ve acted a lot like the other guy, surely you can see that I’m troubled by it and I intend to stop.”

Inconsistencies between campaign rhetoric and executive action are easily understood, since national security looks a lot different from the Oval Office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa. But this was different. This seemed to be about inconsistency between the president’s deeds and his own deepest beliefs.

Of course, the emergence of ISIS, the meltdowns in Yemen, the disintegration of Iraq and Syria and Libya, and the growth of al-Qaeda wannabes have put most of these discussions on hold. No one is currently enthused at the prospect of the United States voluntarily staying its hand.

But these questions will eventually resurface. At some point the debate on targeted killings will be rejoined.

In my view, the United States will need to keep this capacity and be willing to use it. Islamist terrorism thrives in places—Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Mali, the list goes on—where governments cannot or will not act. In some of these instances, the United States must.

And unmanned aerial vehicles with precision weapons and exquisite intelligence offer a proportional and discriminating response when one is judged necessary.

What we need here is a dial, not a switch.

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P
AKISTAN WAS THE ONE AREA
where all the dilemmas of the war on terror seemed to play out in their most extreme form.

CIA had actually had good success working with Pakistani ISI sweeping up al-Qaeda in the settled regions of that country: Abu Zubaida in Faisalabad (2002); Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Karachi (2002); Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi (2003); Abu Faraj al-Libi near Peshawar (2005). Success good enough, it seemed, that senior al-Qaeda no longer frequented the settled regions and opted for the relative safety of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the FATA.

Nobody has ever ruled the FATA, not the British Raj and certainly
not the Pakistani government. Tribal law, custom, and kinship still govern there. I recall a conversation I had with then ISI chief Pasha in 2008. I was preaching cooperation and partnership, so I was going out of my way to emphasize how much we relied on ISI expertise to understand things like the tribal region. All the while I was thinking that Pasha, a Punjabi, was as much a foreigner in Waziristan as I was.

In September 2006, retired Pakistani general and former corps commander Ali Jan Aurakzai, a Pashtun and hence a member of the region’s dominant ethnic group, signed an agreement—the Waziristan Accord—that effectively ended Pakistani military operations in the FATA. In return, the local Pashtun tribal leaders (the maliks) promised they would police the region, stop cross-border movements, expel or control “the foreigners” (i.e., al-Qaeda), and clamp down on Talibanization and paramilitary training.